Section 1 (2) of the Abortion Act, which states that doctors may take account of the pregnant woman’s actual or reasonably foreseeable environment when making a decision about the impact of the continuance of a pregnancy on a woman’s health. Here again, the law bestows upon doctors a gatekeeping role in terms of deciding who may have an abortion, but within that role provides for a great deal of latitude in making their decision. The law does not state that doctors ‘must’ take account of a woman’s environment, but that they ‘may’ do so. There is an implicit recognition that it is not always possible to separate the mental or physical health effects of abortion from a woman’s wider social circumstances - such as her income, her housing situation, her support network. Doctors may take all this into account in determining whether to authorise an abortion
